The Anchor Plate : Intellectual Property Lawyers & Attorneys : BrickHouse Law Group : Open-Price Lawyering, Hourly Billing : St. Louis, Missouri

How cool is the internet?  Seriously. 

Thanks to Twitter, I started following Jordan Furlong (@jordan_law21),an Ottowa-based attorney who blogs about the evolution of our profession at Law 21.ca.  He recently tweeted about a blog post by Neil Denny (@NeilDenny), from Bath, England, who describes himself as a "collaborative lawyer".  From there, I discovered Neil's great blog, Lawyer1point9.  If you haven't been there, take the trip -- it's worth it.

While at Neil's blog, I discovered a lengthy post he wrote last year entitled "The End of Lawyers and the Power of Po."  Wow.  A commentary on Richard Susskind's book "The End of Lawyers" -- which many have seen as a doom-inducing diatribe on the woes of an archaic legal profession -- Neil suggests instead that Susskind's book should be a starting point for discussing the potentialities of a new way of practicing law.

I can't do it justice in this post, so please go read the entire piece, but suffice to say that I find myself in full agreement with Neil's basic point:

"We can choose to keep on doing what we have always done, and justify our self-deception with passionate, strident arguments as to why possible changes will not affect us. Or we can choose to engage in the debate, to read, or hear Susskind out, and consider how the arguments might impact us, our law firms, and yes, even our very jobs and livelihoods."

There is no denying the situation we find ourselves in as a profession — law firms are laying off partners and associates while they continue to raise rates, law schools continue to churn out new lawyers with staggering amounts of debt but without much promise of a good-paying job, and clients are increasingly skeptical of the uncertainty that clouds much of the cost of obtaining legal services.

I heartily agree that the response to this situation cannot be to ignore or downplay it. Rather, we need to use it as a starting point for the next conversation — the one that starts with “What now?”

We can believe in the importance of the law and the value of good legal advice without being wedded to an outdated model for delivering our services.  We can't go back to the way things were, and frankly, we shouldn't want to.  How we go forward, however, is open to lots of debate.  Let's get started.

And thanks, Jordan and Neil, for helping to point the way.